Information Architects (creators of iA Writer) have published a new Markdown extension spec for annotations:
We store authorship as a separate block at the end of a file. This keeps texts easy to read and share, but requires a tool to update and show authorship. We think it’s the right tradeoff.
Markdown Annotations embed authorship in text while preserving its readability and portability.
--- Annotations: 0,95 SHA-256 1132bf5e376a605f5beed4b204456114 @Human: 0,20 33,4 45,6 62,4 &AI: 20,13 37,8 51,11 66,29 ...We’ve put a lot of thought, time, and effort into this idea and the implementation. We are open to working with other apps to adapt the idea in some form, ideally establishing a standard.
While the format is open, avoid cloning our work. Draw inspiration from what we made. Change it. Improve it. Design it yourself. Work on it until it is substantially better. If you can’t beat our design, then let it be and do something else.
What do you think of iA Writer’s work here? I think this would be more useful if you had an app to keep the annotations up to date, but otherwise I imagine it would be painful to use a plain text editor to manually keep the character ranges up to date.